Living with Art – Painting on Fabric

This week for our living with art class we painted on fabric (find out more here about living with art). As we have been doing the projects I tried to find things that my students can use. For the fabric painting I found this messenger bag from Darice. I thought it would be great for them to carry their art journal and painting supplies in along with the paper mache pencil case.

We used DecoArt SoSoft fabric paints and Loew Cornell fabric brushes to do the project. There is a nice selection of colors and I love that the paints leave your surface soft. Did I mention that they have a lot of nice pinks and some of the paints shimmer and have glitter in them. 🙂

Since you use stiffer brushes and scrub the paint into the fabric I gave the students a piece of canvas to paint on and try some blending techniques.

I gave them the option of painting anything they wanted on their projects, but after seeing Sara’s bag we had a flamingo thing happen. I loved it. Here is Sara and her mother with their bags:

And Daniel with his bag. He also had time to make a neon yellow D for his room.

And here are the rest of the projects done by my younger class:

You can see by their smiles that they all enjoyed painting their bags. You are just seeing one side of the bags. Most were painted on 3 or 4 sides. I like that the bags are something they can use and have a lot of painting surface.

I also love seeing the relationships developing between the girls and how their love of art is making them friends.